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Finally got around to examining the new scenarios in the latest version of the CSP.
The last one very much caught my immediate interest:
Between Ascension and San Carlos – The carrier duel (1982): This hypothetical scenario depicts aggressive moves by Argentinian task forces, including the Venticinco de Mayo carrier, trying to attack escorted Royal Navy replenishment ships, carrying much needed fuel and spares to the British task force to the South. The Royal Navy, discovering the plan, calls the Invincible carrier with escorts and a SSN for help from the south, trying to stop the Argentine formation and save the replenishment ships.
Firstly, to the scenario author giantsquid: THANK YOU!!! I've wanted to fight a battle exactly like this once I learned that Argentina had deployed an Aircraft Carrier, but it didn't engage in combat.
Now, I tried it out today, and got crunched. The Argentineans sank at least one of the tankers without any real opposition on my part.
It's probably the fact that I'm used to working with US aircraft carriers, but I was struggling to figure out how I am supposed to do this with only 8 Sea Harriers, only two of which are ready armed with ordinance I can use against Vientecinco de Mayo.
I also tried and failed twice to intercept Argentinean S-2 Tracker aircraft, I had my patrolling harriers get their radar on, and they couldn't detect the Trackers firmly enough for a Sidewinder shot.
Some advice on how I can tackle this situation would be greatly appreciated.
My two Harriers armed with iron bombs (3x 1000 lbs) have a strike radius of 205nm, and the briefing says the Argentinean fleet is around 300 miles away.
Loadouts of Rockets and Clusterbombs give me a further reach, but of course take time to arm my aircraft, and I don't know how effective they may be. Would that sort of ordinance stop or delay flight operations on Vientecinco de Mayo if I'm able to firmly hit the flight deck?
But above all, How do you think I should go about trying to locate the Argentinean Fleet? When the strike aircraft attacked the Tankers, they basically were not spotted until on their attack runs.
Obviously I don't have any AEW aircraft. I would love to have just one Hawkeye though.
Thank you for your comments. After the other one about Falkland Islands in the same battleset that's my first scenario in CMANO, so I'm pleased it sounds ok and challenging.
I did some play testing of course. The key is to prevent recon and attack on the tankers by S-2 & A-4 using Sea Harriers. If you need there's plenty of time to change your loadout to do a first strike or close with the SSN.
I gave it another go this afternoon. Did much better, but not great.
I was able to blast the first two S-2 aircraft with a pair of Harriers before they found any of my ships. Also bagged a helo as well.
Eventually, a mistake on my part caused an S-2 to locate the Frigate group escorting the tankers, resulting in 8 or 9 Skyhawks armed with Iron bombs attacking them. The first four attacked and heavily damaged HMS Amazon, but all four were shot down. The next group attacked, Sinking Amazon and causing crippling damage to HMS Broadsword and minor damage to HMS Antelope. Broadsword sinks.
By this time I have a fix on the group of ships that must include Vientecinco de Mayo, but I cannot tell which ship she is. I also have located two other enemy task groups, one of which probably has the General Belgrano.
HMS Splendid is too far out to attack at this point, and ready bomb Armed Harriers are not in range yet. I maneuver the Invincible group to join with HMS Antelope, which is racing southward. I had already at the start ordered the tankers on a Southeasterly course to try and swing around the battle area.
Eventually, as the sun is setting, I am finally in range of the Vientecinco de Mayo. I launch a pair of strikes. The first with two Harriers I had rearmed with a single 1000lb bomb and two sidewinders. They fail to score hits on the ship I judged to likely be the Vientecinco de Mayo.
The next strike also attacks the same vessel, but I still don't have a positive ID on which ship is the carrier. Hits are scored, but the ship in question is not damaged too badly.
Now it is after dark, and I attempt another pair of strikes at night, which fail to hit the target, but also allow me to see that I was attacking the wrong ship.
With the Vientecinco de Mayo now positively located. I dispatch HMS Antelope to get some revenge for here fellow frigates lost earlier.
She launches her four Exocets in a night attack which slam into the carrier. Hits are known, but BDA isn't. HMS Antelope is then blown apart in a retaliatory attack with Exocets from the carrier's escorts.
I am able to get one of my Sea Kings low enough over Vientecinco de Mayo to get a quick BDA: Heavy damage and some fires.
Then out of game circumstances forced me to exit, and I forgot to save [:(]
I hope I've learned from my mistakes and hope to tackle this again soon.
My first play through I put a harrier to the north and one to the west. I was able knock down S-2s almost immediately. My two Sea King surface radar patrols quickly picked up the enemy groups. That made it easy to route my convoy around them. I kept knocking S-2s down until there were none left. After that, it was not too difficult to eventually knock out the carrier.
Here is the map of one of my save.
Tankers run alone, northern escorts steam toward enemy
SSN close to enemy ships
Exocet armed ships close to Arg. task force. Main targets: carrier and general belgrano
Hope this helps.
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Haven't played it, but IIRC from real life situation, Veinticinco de Mayo was being shadowed by one Superb class SSN. This at least should give you an approximate idea of her location.
This is a hypothetical combat situation so HMS Splendid is not in that position relative to the Veinticinco de Mayo group.
In this situation, the Vienticinco de Mayo as well as the General Belgrano combine with several other ships to attack the British replenishment ships coming down from the north.
I got kinda lucky on my first playthrough. The Sea Kings are indeed the key, with the long-range surface search radar (make sure to operate them at max altitude to get the most of their radar range). The Sea King also has a very good ELINT sensor, with Specific Emitter ID; it picks up the S-2 Trackers from over 100 nm away. I spotted the Argentine carrier group while remaining undetected, and sent the Harriers one at a time against the Trackers. The Trackers operate at 12000 feet, inside the cloud layer, and the Sea Harrier radar doesn't have good look-down capability, so you pretty much have to be at their altitude to pick them up on the Harrier's radar, and you have to get extremely close to hit them with an IR missile, but it does work. Fortunately the Tracker has a crappy 35 nm range radar, and they're slow, so you have a lot of time to hunt them down before they can find you. Sea Harriers have short legs, but you have enough of them that you can keep at least one up at all times, ready to respond as soon as your Sea Kings detect the Trackers' radar. With only 4 Trackers, the Argentines are quickly blinded this way.
I turned on the air search radar of one of the ships in my tanker escort group as well, with the idea that I'd rather have early warning so I at least have a chance to defend myself, even though it might also broadcast my position. Turns out that since none of the Argentine aircraft have good ELINT or RWR, they can't detect your ship radars from beyond the surface horizon range, so you can use your radars pretty freely.
Once you find a group of ships, you can ID them by flying a Sea Harrier overhead, then dropping down through the clouds to low level and mil power and buzzing the group. One pass and haul ass, and you've got your target priorities. You'll pick up a little AA fire this way, but I didn't take any hits.
Then it's just a matter of getting your pieces in place. I sent my tankers east at their max speed (13 kts IIRC) to keep them out of harm's way. I used my tanker escort group to counter their frigate SAG. As long as you keep your ships together, HMS Broadsword can knock down incoming Exocets (as long as you have your radar on and therefore detect them in time), and they have no SAMs in that group, so your missiles attack with near impunity (their OECM is sometimes a problem, and can result in expending more missiles than you'd like, but they will eventually get through).
After waiting to get close enough, I used the Sea Harriers with bombs to do a strike on the Venticinco de Mayo, significantly damaging it (finished it off at the very end of the scenario with torps from HMS Splendid). For best results, drop down through the clouds outside of visual range, then come in at minimum altitude and mil power, popping up to 800 ft (minimum bomb release altitude) when you're a mile or two away. Again, one pass and haul ass. The remaining Exocets from my escort group I used on ARA Hercules and the rest of the ships in their carrier group. They have Sea Dart missiles, but since their radar remained passive almost the entire time, they didn't pick up my Exocets until it was too late. Then I used HMS Splendid to take out the Belgrano group, which has ancient sonar systems not at all up to the task of picking up a modern nuke sub. And that was that: clean sweep, no losses. The Argentines never launched an air strike, and I never encountered the Argentine sub.
Things that would make this scenario significantly harder, and possibly more realistic:
* Some kind of event that would trigger the Argentine forces to go active with their radar, with at least one ship in each group. They seem to be set to passive the whole time, which greatly limits their early warning and allows you to drop planes out of the clouds anywhere around them that you choose. The only time they go active is when they're under attack, which means they spot incoming Exocets and planes visually at only a few miles and never really have time to react.
* If the Argentines conducted their own air patrols or intercepts with a couple Skyhawks. They can pick up your Sea King's radars and get a pretty decent position on them, and losing your Sea Kings would be a major problem. It might also force you to escort your helicopters, thereby tying up some of your planes.
* The Argentine sub could also be at periscope depth to act as an ELINT platform. With Sea State 3, it should be pretty hard to pick up, and tooling along at creep speed it would very hard for your nuke sub to find it either.
Very fun scenario though. If you enjoyed it, I highly recommend the book Air War South Atlantic by Jeffrey Ethell and Alfred Price as an excellent overview of the Falklands War, and for a more personal account, Sea Harrier Over The Falklands by Sharkey Ward, who led the 801 Squadron on Invincible during the war.
Edit: I had a couple things wrong. I forgot I used the Lynx with Sea Skuas against the Argentine frigate SAG to take out a damaged survivor of the Exocet attacks. No Argentine ships can actually use missiles against Exocets, because of all the missile types in the scenario, only the Sea Wolf (found only on Broadsword-class) can engage down to 30 ft altitude. That makes Exocet attacks a lot easier for you, and since Argentina is almost always in passive radar mode, the missiles are never really seen in time. I also broke off most of the Invincible's escorts to form a second frigate group with more Exocets to do secondary attacks and mop-ups. And, the Sea Dart can be used in surface-to-surface mode, making it a significant secondary weapon.
Thanks for your nice AAR and advices, I'm the scenario designer.
The rationale behind the skyhawks is that i set all of them on a strike mission targeting carrier or tankers. I thought you need a massive attack to penetrate defences, without wasting them on a feeble air defence.
2-4 skyhawk could be set on an air intercept mission at 150 nm to attack enemy recon, correct?
You are right about the radars... I don't know how to model this. Something like: If I detect a strong radar emission I go active and remain active for 2 hours
The sub is doing this, patrolling and sometimes snorkeling.
Another alteration of the alteration would be assuming a faster the modification of the V-2's catapults to handle the Super Etenard. That would give them Exocet capability. It eventually happened a couple years after the war.
I think Argentina had only 5-6 air-launched AM-39s. There were also a couple of MM40 ship-launched ones, but they wouldn't effect this scenario. But they did have the missiles if you want to stretch it so that they could remount them on their DDs.
